The Soldier's Poisoned Heart

ul felt his lips twitch between frustration and amusement. So it was to be that way, he thought. And then young Lydia reached her hand out and touched his cheek before turning to go inside.

“Opening night,” he called in, and set off without waiting one moment more to the box office. Opening night of any show, even in a city smaller than London, was not trivial to get tickets. What he lacked in notoriety, he would make up for in preparedness.

“Have you got time?” John Paul cut into his nephew's reverie when he'd returned home.

“Of course,” Henry answered.

“We’ve got some more work to do. This shouldn’t be too long, though.”

Henry dressed and followed after his uncle.

“We’ve been here for two months, my boy.”

“I suppose that sounds right.”

“And we’ve done a good deal of work, wouldn’t you say?”

Henry agreed that they had.

“So now we need to take a stock of what remains to finish the job. At what point can we invite the finer folk from town to the reinvigorated Foster Estate?”

Henry nodded and said nothing.

John Paul pulled a pair of slates from the counter, handed one to Henry, and picked up a piece of chalk for himself.

“Now, we’ll need some sort of systematic approach,” he said absently.

“I suppose top to bottom and then outside makes as much sense as any, would you agree?”

“I suppose,” Henry answered.

John Paul walked away and up the stairs, hearing Henry tromping up behind him. He walked back to the north side of the building. He regarded the dolls sitting against the wall of the otherwise-empty room.

“The wall-paper is peeling,” he said. It wasn’t an observation of the room so much as the entire house summed up. “It will need to be stripped and replaced.”

Henry snorted in agreement, and John Paul ignored him.

“The floors, as well,” Henry added after a moment. “They’re looking worn. They should be refinished, as well.”

John Paul scowled. One room in, and two more massive jobs to be done. He cursed his own desire to have bought himself into such an ambitious project. The decision, however, had been made. There was no going back on it now.

“Anything else in this room?”

“Those dolls look a little—”

John Paul turned on his heel and walked out of the room. As he passed Henry, he answered “The dolls will stay, I think, until there is something to be done with them.”

When Henry looked a little hurt at the tone, John Paul softened. “They’re perfectly good, after all.”

Even for his softer tone of voice, both of them knew that there was little room, if any, for argument. John Paul continued walking, crossing the hall into the next room. The same problems, here. Someone had broken the window glass, as well, likely some young men with rocks over the past several years.

John Paul wondered if Henry had been that sort. Of course he was, the Colonel thought. He gave all the signs of having lived a terribly, so to speak, exciting life before coming to live with his uncle.

There were curtains to be replaced as well. Most of the curtain rods were broken and bent, and had been thrown out with the rest of the furniture. He wrote this down. At least that was a job that he could do with relative ease.

The rooms were disorganized as well; a mishmash of poorly-selected wallpapers and mislaid floors. Henry wasn’t wrong. The floors looked bad. He couldn’t let anyone of merit see him with such poor flooring.

The second floor was much the same: old-fashioned, mismatched wall-paper. Warped hardwood flooring. The work, at least, was cut out for them. The bottom floor had the same sort of problems, which the entire household had been ignoring for the past month.